o c t o b e r 2 0 1 1 OpenText Tempo Social Paving the road towards a more social business A social business is one that weaves a social fabric into all of its business processes to help build stronger connections between its customers, partners, stakeholders, and employees, while increasing purpose-driven communication. Learn how can help socialize your business processes through encouraging more efficient knowledge sharing and collaboration and creating more engaging customer experiences.
Contents Introduction... 3 The Shift to Social Business... 4 The Value of Socializing Business Processes.... 6... 8
Introduction Experts and analysts agree social media is not simply a fad. It is a viable, rapidly growing communication and knowledge sharing mechanism that has proven its value, and will only continue to increase in popularity over time. Social media has fundamentally changed the way people connect with each other and the way organizations interact with people customers, partners, stakeholders, and their employees and it is now starting to change the way we do business. We are starting to see a real shift in the actual business model as well. Social media was typically seen as a tool used for external marketing but is now being considered as a tool used internally to help improve productivity. With this shift, we are seeing organizations moving towards a more social business. A social business is one that weaves a social fabric into all of its business processes to help build stronger connections between its people thus increasing purpose-driven communication. The ripple effect of open and improved communication can result in prominent customer relationships, increased user adoption, enhanced internal efficiencies, higher revenue, and unparalleled insight and knowledge management. Social business is not just about technology, it s about doing business effectively in a new communications environment. It s becoming less about selling to the audience and more about connecting with the audience. It s about the shift of controlling the message to building more transparency. The journey towards becoming a social business does take time and effort, but an increasing number of businesses are realizing that the long-term benefits of implementing a social component in their everyday business processes are far greater than the inherent risks, especially with the right solution, governance and strategy. Finding the right social media solution that is scalable and easily adopted can sometimes be challenging. However, adding these features through the use of third party tools and internal IT teams can prove to be a time-consuming and an expensive venture. OpenText understands what enterprises in B2B, B2C, and B2E environments need and has developed a Social Media platform that enables organizations to better harvest knowledge and interact with customers, users and partners. Our solution drives greater productivity through improved and streamlined business processes and more effective spontaneous and structured collaboration. is a robust, innovative, and feature-rich social software platform. With, enterprises can rapidly and economically deploy a full range of social media applications into their existing software applications. As a result, they can boost user adoption, facilitate continued application usage, leverage new sales opportunities and revenue streams, and deliver greater value to both their customers and end users. It s about doing business effectively... ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT 3
The Shift to Social Business More and more, people are using the speed and convenience of the web to communicate and share information with others all around the world. Surveys performed by the Pew Research Center, an independent organization that provides information and statistics about the latest trends shaping American culture, show that more than half of Internet users create and/or share content online with others. Research published by industry consulting firm, Deloitte, confirms this and also claims that the number of people who consume usergenerated content (UGC) via the web increases to 71 percent when the user base is less than 25 years of age. Collaborative tools are not new to the business world, but they have evolved due to the popularity of consumer tools such as wikis, blogs, micro-blogs, RSS feeds, and tagging. The evolution of these social collaborative features have enabled users the ability to aggregate the collective insights, experience, and knowledge of participants. The age-old notion of two heads are better than one has never been more true than in today s working environment as solutions to problems are being found quicker by Twitter or a community discussion forum or a specialized blog. Social media features have evolved to enable people to share and discover knowledge, contribute opinions and ideas, and participate in virtual communities of interest. We are seeing the shift from top down mechanistic business to social business more rapidly than ever before. Workers no longer function effectively in silos and the demand for collaboration to work more effectively is inevitable and necessary. Customers also demand more from their brand, feel entitled to voice their feedback and, more importantly, expect change once that feedback is given. Organizations must find new streams of revenue and enhance customer experiences that will result in repeated business. These new demands and changes mean that businesses need to start thinking about their social and online strategy and invest in a scalable software solution that can take them to the next level. Customers also demand more from their brand, feel entitled to voice their feedback and, more importantly, expect change once that feedback is given. The number of Internet users who create and consume user-generated content is increasing every day. ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT 4
Rapid Growth of Social Business Web users today expect a lot from the sites they visit. Customers, suppliers, partners and employees all want to voice their opinion in a place where they can be heard and feel like part of a community. They need an engaging online experience filled with rich content, personalization, and social features. Businesses that have incorporated social media into their marketing strategies have seen results in customer responses and website visits. According to a study by the McKinsey Global Institute, 1 63% of companies that use social media have reported an increase in marketing effectiveness. With the proper tracking mechanisms in place such as web and social analytic tools, social media features such as blogs, discussion forums and networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be quite effective in generating new leads. Hubspot s latest reports on the State of Inbound Marketing showed that B2C businesses that have blogs generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not. Also, companies that blog have 55% more website visitors every month. 2 The rapid adoption of social features and software, whether for personal or business purposes, means that people are using these mechanisms to communicate with each other and to document their knowledge and opinions. According to Frost & Sullivan s The Enterprise Social Media and Collaboration Report 2011, Social media use for collaboration in the enterprise is set to double by 2013, with the education, financial and professional services sectors driving the uptake. 3 As the enterprise starts to grow towards a social business, many are already realizing the significant advantages that can be achieved by augmenting their existing enterprise and web solutions with social software functionality. According to IDC s Social Business Survey conducted in September 2010, 41 percent of respondents indicated that they have already implemented an enterprise social software solution, and 35 percent of survey respondents believed that using social software made them more productive. Aligning social features with broader content and knowledge management strategies help equip the enterprise for the cultural shift and business process augmentation that accompanies the adoption of a more social business. Equip the enterprise for the cultural shift 1 Mckinsey Global Institute December 2010. 2 Hubspot. State of Inbound marketing lead generation report 2010. 3 Frost & Sullivan. The Enterprise Social Media and Collaboration Report 2011 ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT 5
The Value of Socializing Business Processes Social Media promises to break down walls and open communication channels, but for many organizations this promise is falling short. The reasons you hear are many; but the fact is that realizing the value of social media remains elusive. How can the Enterprise weave a social fabric into their existing business processes so that these applied social capabilities deliver value to the bottom line? OpenText customers can combine social features with broader online and knowledge management strategies to deliver powerful social applications to their users and customers through the web, intranet and extranet. OpenText eliminates the tension with a social media platform that enables support for meeting communications goals as well as meeting the strictest compliance standards. Traditional and social approaches work with each other to increase value and reduce risk rather than causing compliance, security, and staffing problems that will need further investment to solve. As businesses move towards adopting a social business, many are already realizing the significant advantages, both internally and externally, that can be achieved by extending their existing solutions with social features. For example, HR departments are incorporating social applications to their day-to-day activities to help support and cultivate a more collaborative corporate culture. HR professionals are able to use social media to help better expand their reach and increase the presence of their organization, bringing the extra benefit of possibly finding new talent for their organization. The increased knowledge sharing that can help with improved social collaboration can also help to reduce the amount of knowledge that gets lost when an employee leaves. Marketing departments are also seeing the benefits by creating new channels for conversation with their customers and the ability to better connect with their audience. The ability for marketing to monitor, react, and respond to what is happening on the web is a requirement in today s social business environment. An increasing number of businesses are looking for ways to interact with their customers, using conversations to garner feedback and to improve insight into customer preferences and needs. By making the web more engaging, organizations can foster community, encourage collaboration, increase customer loyalty and drive increased revenue. Social business has productivity impacts (especially felt by IT) but the real impact is the increased engagement your audiences have with the communications initiatives that you invest in. Every dollar spent on communications has a higher rate of return as a result of social business. It s about new communications in a compliance oriented world... Efficient Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration By encouraging the free flow of knowledge, ideas, and experiences in a community-style setting, social capabilities make applications a more convenient, more comfortable, and most importantly, more valuable and relevant environment in which people can interact. ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT 6
Expanded mindshare The rate at which people communicate and expect feedback was expedited with the introduction of email years ago. Today, with the expansive capabilities of social applications, the expectation for rapid information and shared knowledge is even greater. Shifting to a more social business provides users with a preferred method of communication with colleagues, sharing ideas, collaborating around projects and carrying out purpose-driven tasks and workflow steps. In a social business, the working environment fosters informal collaboration and networking to help improve idea sharing, increase productivity, and speed up the rate of innovation. Increased social learning is also a residual benefit of implementing social software in organizations as employees and customers look to specialized blogs, online communities or discussion forums to seek expertise. User adoption rates will be further increased through viral participation, as colleagues, friends, and other peers are invited to participate and share. As more users collaborate and share knowledge using available social tools inside and outside of the enterprise, both from their desktops as well as from their mobile devices, organizations must find an effective means of gathering the valuable information that is being exchanged and documented online. A virtual user community to connect experts More Engaging Customer Experiences Enabling customers to communicate with one another can foster closer relationships and even encourage peer-to-peer support, which may result in improved customer loyalty, reduced support cots, or even increased innovation. Users create networks of trusted peers, which can be used to help expand and organization s reach with fewer resources. Social media can help businesses to more effectively deliver their marketing messages and value propositions to their target audience. By distributing relevant and timely information directly to potential buyers, the chances of delays and information latency are significantly reduced. Companies also gain greater control over content, ensuring that their statements are always clear, accurate, and compelling, by eliminating the risk of messages getting lost in translation when journalists and editors alter, then re-publish the information. As more users embrace the online channel web, mobile, digital media as a viable and useful peer communication channel, they will expect the same type of open, unhindered interaction with the banks, insurance companies, online retailers, and other companies they do business with. By deploying applications with social media functionality, companies can enhance the way they deal with existing and potential customers, as well as strategic partners. As a result, they can build stronger, longer-lasting, and more profitable relationships. Additionally, they can create a virtual user community, enabling these external stakeholders to communicate and collaborate with other individuals who have similar needs and interests. This can empower their customers to enhance productivity by connecting with experts (for example, other users who may have more experience with the software), and facilitate the rapid exchange of tips, best practices, and other innovative ideas among the client base. With socially-enabled software, companies can gather and centralize the collective wisdom of the entire community which includes employees, customers, and business partners and use it to build and publish a comprehensive knowledge base that can be easily accessed by all stakeholders. This can be particularly useful in a variety of scenarios. For example, in the case of software troubleshooting, it can enable users to answer their own questions or find solutions to their problems using intelligence and insight that has been previously shared by others. ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT 7
OpenText is a proven leader in both web experience and enterprise content management (ECM). With a notable portfolio of powerful, state-of-the-art solutions that fully leverage digital content to transform stale, static websites into dynamic environments, OpenText is helping organizations provide users with the most exciting and engaging customer experience possible. As an integral part of the ECM Suite 2010, provides an enterpriseclass social media platform that helps organizations to lead in social business. Tempo Social builds on the security and governance of the OpenText ECM Suite to apply appropriate controls to social objects such as blogs and wikis, opening the door to more productive and safe sharing of content, helping customers balance the power of social media with the need to address and manage compliance issues. As part of the ECM Suite, it uses shared services natively such as records management, archiving, portal presentation and web content management. Tempo Social is also integrated with the recently acquired mobility platform, Wave, to provide mobile apps on all mobile operating systems. As smartphones and tablets gain widespread adoption, it is critical to the business to be able to empower end-users with mobile access to their social activity, keeping them connected anytime, everywhere. According to Gartner, by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. Tempo Social integrates with OpenText Wave, our Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP), which enables organizations to create, develop, and deliver compelling mobile applications for employees, partners, and customers. OpenText understands that it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of any new solution and that businesses need to understand the potential gains, costs, and return on investment that social business initiatives have on a company s bottom line. Seamless integration with OpenText Web and Social Analytics offers the ability to monitor and measure social activity. By analyzing real-time visitor and social interaction information, organizations can optimize online initiatives and identify actionable trends within their visitor base, and capture user events that are specific to business goals. Tempo Social provides a set of ready-to-deploy social apps for social intranet, social marketing and social workplace workloads. These are complemented by reusable and adaptable site templates with the flexibility to combine features as needed to meet specific goals, such as launching a brand, product or campaign. These new social applications help to quickly deliver out-of-the-box functionality to address specific business needs such as: ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT 8
1. Social Intranet / Extranet: Evolving an informational website to a social experience. Customers need the ability to integrate social capabilities, in a compliant fashion, with the rest of their web, intranet, and extranet properties and enterprise applications. Having a safe environment of dialogue will foster informal collaboration and networking and help to improve idea sharing, increase productivity, and speed the rate of innovation. This application enables users to more easily discover content and experts within the organization. Encouraging employees, customers, and partners to engage increases bottom-up conversations so that all users can provide their ideas and discuss various topics in social forums. 2. Social Marketing: Engaging customers authentically on the Social Web. Creating an online dialogue between your users and customers, whether it s B2B, B2E or B2C, can help create and retain customers, increase wallet-share with existing customers, and create champions who can help increase your brand reputation. This out-of-the-box application allows users to create an environment where visitors, partners and customers can build conversations. 3. Social Workplace Delivering purpose driven team spaces This application allows teams to focus, work efficiently, and connect with relevant resources and expertise throughout the organization. It provides team members with the ability to aggregate work, share resources, and benefit from the feedback and insight of the entire team. What makes Tempo Social the ideal solution for businesses looking to extend their software applications with robust and innovative social capabilities? Tempo Social is one of the most comprehensive and feature-rich social media technologies on the market today. So, instead of piecing together a bunch of disparate solutions to achieve the needed functionality, businesses can leverage a single, complete, fully-unified platform that provides the broadest range of services and applications to support the creation, governance and sharing of user generated content. Through integration with OpenText ECM Suite, Tempo Social can reduce the risks of applying social media in the enterprise by capturing all social objects created in the application for archival purposes. Additionally, it can boost the value of Intranets and other internal and external websites by enabling improved networking, knowledge-sharing, and productivity across the enterprise. With Tempo Social, businesses can fully embrace the social media phenomenon, maximizing the impact of their both their external and internal web presence by facilitating greater brand awareness, improved customer loyalty, more open communication with existing and potential clients, and most importantly, increased revenues. Social Intranet/Extranet Social Marketing Social Workplace About OpenText OpenText is the world s largest independent provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software. The Company s solutions manage information for all types of business, compliance and industry requirements in the world s largest companies, government agencies and professional service firms. OpenText supports approximately 46,000 customers and millions of users in 114 countries and 12 languages. For more information about OpenText, visit www.opentext.com. www.opentext.com sales@opentext.com 800 499 6544 Visit online.opentext.com for more information about OpenText solutions. Corporation is a publicly traded company on both NASDAQ (OTEX) and the TSX (OTC). Copyright 2012 by Corporation. OpenText,, and Be Enterprising are trademarks or registered trademarks of Corporation. This list is not exhaustive. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved. (08/2012)00147EN